Archive for the ‘Admiralty’ Category
Pirate Democracy
posted by Gerard Magliocca
I just finished a fun book that I want to recommend. It’s “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates” by Peter T. Leeson. The author explores the Golden Age of Piracy (circa 1720) and shows how pirates overcame collective action problems. While there are many parts that are of interest to lawyers (for example, the pirate use of trademarks — the Jolly Roger — and crude advertising to enhance their brand of terror and encourage capitulation), the issue that I want to focus on is pirate governance.
Leeson points out that pirates needed to create a legitimate authority amongst themselves because the cost of having unhappy crew members was high. Even one disgruntled pirate could desert and expose the ship to the authorities. (And the penalty for piracy was death). So how did pirate gangs handle this?
April 21, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Posted in: Admiralty
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Parrots and the Jolly Roger
posted by
Piracy is back in the news, and it’s not the intellectual kind. This is great for admiralty professors, and so I thought I’d take advantage of this brief moment in the sun to talk about some general legal issues involving pirates before discussing the ones operating off of Somalia.
Since ancient times, pirates have been considered public enemies under customary international law. This meant that ships were free to use force on the high seas to repel or capture pirates. Indeed, the phrase “public enemies” is still used in maritime contracts as a justification for non-performance in the event of a pirate attack. National governments sometimes authorized privateers to attack enemy merchant ships with letters of marque (the Constitution empowers Congress to issue these in Article One, Section Eight) but these immunity grants from domestic piracy prosecution have not been issued for decades.
April 13, 2009 at 8:18 am
Posted in: Admiralty
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The Case Against Delaware
posted by Frank Pasquale
The state of Delaware has just won a major dispute with New Jersey in the Supreme Court, over a vigorous dissent by Justice Scalia. The dispute concerned New Jersey’s plan to build a “huge gas-processing plant on the Jersey side of the Delaware River.” As the NYT reports,
New Jersey has threatened to pull state pension funds from Delaware banks. Delaware officials, meanwhile, talked about calling up its National Guard to guard its border. . . . [A] New Jersey legislator wondered aloud about recommissioning the battleship New Jersey, now a museum on the Camden waterfront, just in case.
The majority agreed . . . that New Jersey could not authorize activities “beyond the exercise of ordinary and usual riparian rights in the face of contrary regulation by Delaware.” Justice Antonin Scalia . . . professed to be flabbergasted by the majority’s reasoning. What was so “extraordinary” about a wharf to unload liquefied natural gas, he asked. “Would a pink wharf, or a zig-zagged wharf qualify? How about one for the transfer of “tofu and bean sprouts”?
It all reminds me of a classic 2002 article by Jon Chait charging Delaware with persistent disregard for other states’ interests. . . .
March 31, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Posted in: Admiralty, Humor, Supreme Court
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Flying the Stratified Skies
posted by Frank Pasquale
Travel has always served to remind us of the divisions our “classless society” tries so hard to downplay. Sam Walton may have driven an old truck, but you’d be hard-pressed to find most top executives or trust-funders flying in less-than-first-class digs. As the song in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang put it,
O the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me
Pardon the dust of the upper crust – fetch us a cup of tea
Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P. . .
Admittedly, for those of us crushed into coach, there was always a happy flipside to the narrative: the profligates up front were paying so much more for their seats, effectively subsidizing the rest of us.
But that subsidy effect has been on the wane in recent years. And now wealthy fliers have found a new way to effectively assure that the rest of us are subsidizing them:
Corporate jets pay a fraction of the taxes and fees that commercial airliners do. The F.A.A. estimates that private planes, which include both corporate jets and weekend fliers, account for 16 percent of the air traffic control system’s overhead but contribute only 3 percent of the fees earmarked to run the system.
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The Air Transport Association has . . . created a Web-based ad campaign featuring a fictional traveler, Edna, complaining about the fee disparity while the computer screen displays waves of corporate jets filling the skies before and after sporting events like the Kentucky Derby and the Masters golf tournament.
It’s enough to wilt the mint in your julep. As the campy YouTube ad sloganeers, travelers like “wearing big wigs, not subsidizing them!” Edna (pictured above) wonders “Why should the rest of us pay ten times more using the same services?”
Fortunately, the FAA has heard her pain, and is planning on “sharply increasing the fuel tax for private jets and also hitting corporate fliers with extra charges to land at any of the country’s 30 most congested airports.”
August 28, 2007 at 9:45 am
Posted in: Administrative Law, Admiralty, Law and Inequality, Tax
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The Thin Line Between Pirate and Repo Man, Arrrg Matey!
posted by Nate Oman
“Great things are done,” says Blake, “when men and mountains meet;/ This is not done by jostling in the street.” The results when repo men and the sea meet, it would seem, are also not the sort of things done by “jostling in the street.” Under Article 9, a creditor can repossess the collateral of a defaulting debtor so long the repo is done without a “breach of the peace.” What happens, however, when the collateral is a ship? In theory, the sea is governed by a web of international conventions supplemented by the customs and principles of admiralty law. In his fascinating book The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime, William Langewiesche reveals that the reality is considerably messier. The vastness of the oceans continues to provide a level of anonymity that is surprising in our information soaked age, and mobility allows ships to decamp to friendly or corrupt (or both) jurisdictions with ease. In many ways, it is still the wild, wild West. (Perhaps Pirates of the Carribean is a better metaphor.)
Enter F. Max Harberger, who — according to an L.A. Times story sent me by one of my students — is essentially in the business of stealing ships for creditors whose debts are due. The legality of what he does is far from clear, although in fairness he is frequently repoing ships that have been illegally seized by port officials in the developing world who are easily bribed. A $10 million ship can apparently be seized with a $100 bribe to a justice of the peace. Consider the following repo:
March 2, 2007 at 10:29 am
Posted in: Admiralty, Contract Law & Beyond
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